This invention relates to the fabrication of prosthetic teeth such as crowns and bridges, and more particularly to color matching a prosthetic tooth through the patient's dentition.
Presently, dentists and dental practitioners use dental shade guides in order to accomplish color matching for fabricated dental prosthetic teeth. Shade guides used today were originally intended for the selection of commercially manufactured high temperature vacuum-fired porcelain teeth for dentures. The introduction of modern porcelain-fused-to metal ceramics led to the expansion of use of these guides to crown and bridge prosthetics.
Teeth on shade guides are typically made of material other than the actual porcelain-fused-to metal dental ceramic powder. Therefore, shade guide teeth contain different components and different color pigments than dental ceramic powders. Furthermore, such shade guide teeth are unrealistically thick and provide a different impression of color than ceramic fired to a metal base.
In addition, a conventional dental shade guide is less than satisfactory, since the dental practitioner cannot preview the final shade or color in relation to the natural dentition before sending impressions and/or color samples to the laboratory technician for preparation of the dental prosthesis. Moreover, the teeth of shade guides are not a true representation of a produced prosthesis due to material discrepancies between the prosthesis and the shade guide. Accordingly, conventional dental shade guides have been less than satisfactory as a color matching system for the preparation of dental prosthetics.